Optimal Quantization in Energy-Constrained Sensor Networks under Imperfect Transmission

This paper addresses the optimization of quantization at local sensors under strict energy constraint and imperfect transmission to improve the reconstruction performance at the fusion center in the wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We present optimized quantization scheme including the optimal quantization bit rate and the optimal transmission power allocation among quantization bits for BPSK signal and binary orthogonal signal with envelope detection, respectively. The optimization of the quantization is formulated as a convex problem and the optimal solution is derived analytically in both cases. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed quantization schemes

Neural Networks Compression for Language Modeling

In this paper, we consider several compression techniques for the language modeling problem based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs). It is known that conventional RNNs, e.g, LSTM-based networks in language modeling, are characterized with either high space complexity or substantial inference time. This problem is especially crucial for mobile applications, in which the constant interaction with the remote server is inappropriate. By using the Penn Treebank (PTB) dataset we compare pruning, quantization, low-rank factorization, tensor train decomposition for LSTM networks in terms of model size and suitability for fast inference.Comment: Keywords: LSTM, RNN, language modeling, low-rank factorization, pruning, quantization. Published by Springer in the LNCS series, 7th International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, 201

Balanced Quantization: An Effective and Efficient Approach to Quantized Neural Networks

Quantized Neural Networks (QNNs), which use low bitwidth numbers for representing parameters and performing computations, have been proposed to reduce the computation complexity, storage size and memory usage. In QNNs, parameters and activations are uniformly quantized, such that the multiplications and additions can be accelerated by bitwise operations. However, distributions of parameters in Neural Networks are often imbalanced, such that the uniform quantization determined from extremal values may under utilize available bitwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel quantization method that can ensure the balance of distributions of quantized values. Our method first recursively partitions the parameters by percentiles into balanced bins, and then applies uniform quantization. We also introduce computationally cheaper approximations of percentiles to reduce the computation overhead introduced. Overall, our method improves the prediction accuracies of QNNs without introducing extra computation during inference, has negligible impact on training speed, and is applicable to both Convolutional Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks. Experiments on standard datasets including ImageNet and Penn Treebank confirm the effectiveness of our method. On ImageNet, the top-5 error rate of our 4-bit quantized GoogLeNet model is 12.7\%, which is superior to the state-of-the-arts of QNNs

Fixed-Point Performance Analysis of Recurrent Neural Networks

Recurrent neural networks have shown excellent performance in many applications, however they require increased complexity in hardware or software based implementations. The hardware complexity can be much lowered by minimizing the word-length of weights and signals. This work analyzes the fixed-point performance of recurrent neural networks using a retrain based quantization method. The quantization sensitivity of each layer in RNNs is studied, and the overall fixed-point optimization results minimizing the capacity of weights while not sacrificing the performance are presented. A language model and a phoneme recognition examples are used